In the Easter Egg

First post in so much time…

A white Easter has come and gone, with some friends from the UK over to visit us. It was nice and we had a good time, toruing around and eating lots of good stuff…

Also, they acted as surrogate Easter Bunnies, delivering to me a new pair of isolating ear-phones for my MP3 listening, plus the ultimate gadget, a GPS-enabled watch with cardio-pulse recorder…

Now I can finally track my errings, up and down belgium, within a few metres… Now particularly interesting I know, but it’ll come in handy when I want to geo-tag some pictures during trips and so on… Plus I can upload my tracks and treks to Google Earth, to look at them frm above and brag about with my friends 😉

Ain’t that nice?

Happy Easter to everyone!!!

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Too much to do…

And I can’t be bothered in settig up this blog properly. So I end up posting on the old one, not least because blogspot user interface is to me easier and cleaner.

I can’t decide where to stay, so I end up not posting much.

But since in these days I am utterly frustrated by my work life, may be it’s better for you…

The only up-side, is, worryingly, my Risk matches, with some friends. Worryingly because, like most games, at the end it’s just wasted time, not much learned.

Even if I were playing chess, it’s not as if I could make a living out of it… Bof.

Weeds seeds evolve quickly in the city…

Cut and paste from Nature News:

 

This weed’s relatives won’t travel far from home.Gilles Przetak

Urbanization is forcing plants to evolve quickly, but their form of evolution could ultimately put them in danger of dying out.

The daisy-like annual weed Crepis sancta has two types of seed — big, heavy ones that tend to drop straight down, and light, floaty ones that can be caught on the wind and spread farther afield. Weeds growing in patches of soil around trees in the French city of Montpellier have evolved over a period of just 12 years to produce more of the big seeds than the flighty far-reaching ones, says Pierre-Olivier Cheptou from the CNRS in Montpellier who publishes his research team’s findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ¹.

Cheptou first noticed the trend in the ‘field’ of a real urban environment. To find out whether it was due to a genetic change, rather than environmental cues, Cheptou took seeds from both rural and urban environments and grew them in a greenhouse. The two plant types were allowed to be pollinated only by similar plants, and once they flowered, the different types of seeds were collected and counted.

The researchers found that the plants grown from urban seeds produced about 14% heavy seeds, compared with 10% heavy seeds produced by the plants from the countryside. Using a mathematical model, Cheptou worked out that the change had happened over about 10 generations of the plant. This is not the fastest evolution seen in plants, but is a remarkably quick period in which to change, Cheptou says: “it’s very short.”

Concrete jungle

Some seeds are built to drop; others to fly.Eric Imbert

In cities, plants become fragmented — they grow only in certain isolated areas. Cheptou measured the likelihood of seeds landing in an inhospitable site when dispersed in this kind of urban environment. He found that small, light seeds had a 55% lower chance of settling and growing than the heavy seeds that fall straight down into the same patch of ground as the parent. Light seeds were liable to hit a Montpellier parking-lot rather than a patch of soil: habitable ground not covered over with concrete accounts for just 1% of the city.

So having heavy seeds sounds like a good adaptation for a city plant. But the strategy comes with a higher risk of genetic isolation. “It’s clear that after colonization in a fragmented habitat, that fragmentation will prevent gene flow,” says Cheptou. And that can put plants at risk of not keeping up with the times.

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“This evolutionary scenario has a potential danger,” says Karl Niklas, a plant biologist at Cornell University in New York. “If the environment changes rapidly, locally well-adapted populations may go to local extinction and disappear.”

“The downside is that the population fragment is vulnerable if the environment changes there; it will not be able, ever, to reach new and fertile ground if it gives up the potential for long-distance dispersal,” agrees Martin Cody, a plant biologist from the University of California, Los Angeles. Cody has seen a similar effect on isolated ocean islands, where seeds usually carried by the wind have evolved to become bigger and so less likely to be blown out to sea.

I have been to the toothfairy

To get rid of my only wisdom tooth.

She really is a fairy… Thanks to her magic powder (aka Lidocaine) I did not feel a thing when she injected me the real anesthetic. After that it was just a matter of pulling for half an hour and sewing me back…

The Health Insurance apparently will not cover this as I am not yet 65, but at least I got to keep the tooth. Will post a picture of it soon.

There it is, in all its g(l)ory… I better rest now… Anesthesia is wearing off and a dull pain is mounting up…

WordPress is confusing, part one.

I finally managed to post a video from youtube… exactly as I used to do in blogspot.

Still have no idea why it didn’t work at first… Gremlins, may be?

On another topic, I saw two days ago Bee Movie, and to be quite frank, I didn’t like it. The acting is OK, the technical part too. Unfortunately, this movies gets the crown for most biologically confusing movie ever. if there only was such an Oscar. Just checked, there isn’t. Too bad.

Really though, I can forgive the fact that within the hive bees are made to live in suburbs kind of housing, with swimming pool full of honey(!), cars and such… I can understand a metaphore when I see one.

I can forget picturing the hive itself as a factory, for the same reason…

I even enjoyed the suing action brought by the little guy to get back the honey ‘stolen’ by the humans…

But… When the honey is pumped in and all bees get lazy and stop working, and pollinating, the whole world become grey and all plants die suddenly, as if pollination was some kind of magic the bees perform to keep everything in balance.

The absurdity is finally topped up by the dynamic duo going to the rescue of the world by using the few residual pollen grains (from roses, come out from GOD knows where) to repollinate indiscriminately any vegetable species they happen to come around… urgh!!!

I know I know it’s a kid cartoons, but so were “A bug’s life” and “Antz“. And they both were much better at painting insects’ life…

Frankly, I am disappointed by DreamWorks recent forays in the animation realm… Did they loose the magic touch after Shrek?

Yesterday instead, I awarded my own 8+ to Les Poupées russes, for its light hearted humour and very nice montage…

Tonight  the lady is at work so may be I’ll blast “The Host“, or may be something else. who knows?

Enough. Gufo is off.

First post on WordPress!

I went looking for pictures of Disney’s “The Sword in the Stone” movie to grab the Owl from there, and found this:

”

”

I love this movie!!! Gotta find it somewhere online. Come to think of it, I’ve never seen it in original language…

(can’t understand how to post youtube content in this wretched site – well, just go to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VT6Lez_Ck7c&feature=related)

We are moving…

Following the example of the Rabbit, I may soon be moving to WordPress, importing all my old post and such over there.

The reason, quite simply, is the lack of pre-made 3-columns templates on Blogger.

I know I could modify myself the html to allow for that, but I can’t be arsed. After all, that’s the age of internet 2.0, we users are not supposed to know what html is, exactly like you don’t need to know electronics to operate a TV. And since I am no enginneer and want a wide-screen blog in these times of wide-everything, I am getting a new one exactly how I would get a new TV.

It’s as simple as that.

So, you will temporarily be able to find me at: https://gufodotto.wordpress.com

Upload your blogrolls then…

Luca

PS: I will possibly use the opportunity to start another, science-only related blog. I haven’t decided yet what its name is going to be, but I will try to write down a diary of what my work is about… Let’s see how it shapes up…

Wisdom, or lack thereof…

It’s taken thirty years to convince my lonely wisdom tooth to emerge from his burrow… It was a tiny sliver of enamel poking up of my upper-right mandible, only a couple of years ago… Then, it came out bit by bit, and my tongue learned every feature of its contorted surface. It never was much of help in chewing, having come out sideways compared to the other teeth. But alas, I didn’t mind too much – it was a welcome (well tolerated) guest in my mouth…

Wisdom teeth have, by the way, quite an interesting scientific story. They come out later in life, after you’ve been adult for a while, and that’s why they’re called wisdom teeth. At least, that’s my educated guess. Why do they come out later in life? because this way our ancestors would have at least a spare tooth when the other molars were rotten, or just too worn out. I guess they used them on much tougher food that we do today… Charles Darwin himself cites the wisdom teeth as ‘rudimentary’, in “The descent of Man‘, which I am reading right now in the new, concise edition curated by Carl Zimmer.

But let’s go back to my single lonely tooth. Suddenly, just a couple of weeks ago, a dull pain started to manifest itself, and playing with my tongue and finger over it (just imagine the scene) I self-diagnosed that the last, invisible addition to the smile had started to push against the neighbor… yesterday took a dive and, for the first time in years, and only the third time in life, I went to the dentist.

She opened my mouth wide open, looking inside and poking with her shiny metal tools… And prodding around, found a cavity, my first cavity, in my little wisdom tooth… The bastard. Last one to come out, first one to cause me troubles… }8-[

She suggested to take it out, and I buggered off with an excuse (not before being asked to pay 84 Euros for the privilege), with the promise that I’ll show up next wednesday to let her play a bit more with her pliers and drills.

She has, I noticed when she took out her mask, the most beautiful lips I’ve ever seen up close. Hopefully, having a crash on my dentist will help me bear the pain she’ll inflict me. Ouch!

Stay tuned. More to follow…

Michael Pollan has a blog, too!

One of my favourite writers/journalists has a blog, about good agriculture and good food.

Check it out: On The Table

and make sure you read how agricultural policies of developed states influence the things we eat.

It’s a pity he does not update it more often…

Have an Ice Day!!!

Pseudomonas syringae is an extremely interesting bacterium, which I discovered reading Olivia Judson‘s latest post on cloud-dwelling bacteria.

Usually, plants growing in cold regions use special chemicals as anti-freeze. This bacterium, though, secretes Ice Nucleation-active proteins to make ice crystals grow at temperatures as high as -2C. The crystals cause damage to cell walls of plants, and the bacterium vacuums up the nutrients released.

So, they use ice crystals as straw, although the name “syringae” doesn’t come from there. Rather, it comes from the plants they were isolated from at first:

It is named after the lilac tree (Syringa vulgaris), from which it was first isolated^[2]

(from the wikipedia)

and always on the theme of vampires from the cold, the new Penny Arcade strip is out!